On not knowing what's in my own mind

The long weekend has finally given me the opportunity to play catch-up in my teaching prep and in my elearning work so that I have some time to dedicate to the dissertation.

I've been fairly faithful in my New Year's resolution to think/read/write about the dissertation for at least 15 minutes a day, which has been useful in keeping my mind in dissertation mode, but you can't write a dissertation without dedicating some serious and contiguous time to working on it. So now that I have more than 15 minutes to spare every day, I've been taking advantage of it.

One of the tasks on my to do list was to map out in detail all the sections of the dissertation. Not just the chapters, which have been described in the prospectus, but the details within the chapters, section by section, or topic by topic. The plan, after mapping out this detail, is then to read what I need to write a single section, write it, then move on to the next one.

My hope is that in this way I will make the dissertation manageable, because it is big by anyone's standards, and could easily become even bigger. The idea is that unlike what I've been doing so far, which is reading a lot with less writing, I'll be reading exactly what I need, when I need to read it, and then writing the necessary section.

Funny thing is, that when I sat down to map all the sections, some of the chapters that I thought would be the easiest ones to map out, have proved the most difficult. And one chapter for which I had my doubts (and my committee expressed the same), turned out to have real justification for its existence once I sat down and filled in the details of what I wanted to talk about in that chapter.

Strange to think that what I thought was in my head, was not the same as what came out when I started to write it down.

I keep telling my writing students this - heck, I told them that just this week - and yet sometimes I forget it myself. Sometimes writing really is the only way to complete the thought process and to know what's actually in your own mind!